Chris Huhne built up his multi-million-pound fortune through “dodgy
investments” and by relying on his ex-wife’s much larger income, Vicky
Pryce has claimed.

The former cabinet minister, who earns tens of thousands of pounds a year from his considerable property portfolio, was also alleged to have engaged in questionable foreign exchange trading while an MEP.

Pryce, 60, one of Britain’s leading economists, said in an email to a journalist that she felt “a bit of a fool” for not keeping a closer eye on her financial arrangements during her 26-year marriage to Huhne, 58.

She rejected suggestions that her former husband made “millions” working in the City between giving up his first career as a financial journalist and being elected as a Lib-Dem politician.

Huhne in fact earned “considerably” less than his wife for nearly all of his career and would not have been able to amass what he called “his pension” if she had supported their family, she said.

The disgraced ex-MP bought cheap shares in his father’s company Traffic Safety Systems, which supplies speed cameras and mobile CCTV to police forces, and then sold them for a huge profit when it was bought out by the AD Group in December 2003, his former wife claimed.

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Pryce urged Isabel Oakeshott, political editor of The Sunday Times to investigate how Huhne made his money, suggesting that she would uncover “dodgy investments in mining companies etc” and “some dodge fx deals when he was an MEP”.

She wrote to Miss Oakeshott: “In fact except for a brief period when he worked for Fitch and was earning [a] six-figure sum and then got a leaving bonus of a few hundred thousand, he was just a journalist or an MEP or MP, whilst I was earning consistently considerably more and spending it all on the family.

“His supposed wealth owes a certain amount to his final bonus, but was built mainly because for most of our marriage he could rely on me to earn what I did, and partly on an injection of funds from his father through gifts and also cheap shares which were then sold far a huge multiple when his father’s company floated.

“He used all this mainly to pursue his political ambitions and develop a property cushion from which he was earning a rental income.

“So basically if it hadn’t been for me v hard to run the life style we had, buy house outright in Eastleigh and spend what he needed to nurse the seat while building what he called ‘his pension’ which really should have been ‘ours’.”

Writing in March 2011, when she was negotiating her divorce from Huhne, Pryce added: “My current anger is also around what I am discovering looking at the financial disclosures, which has come as a bit of a surprise for me and makes me feel a bit of a fool as I clearly didn’t give our financial arrangements a second thought basically because I was feeling secure in the longevity of my marriage.”